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Reykjavik, August 1941. When a travelling sales rep is found murdered in a Reykjavik flat, killed by a bullet from a Colt 45, the police initially suspect a member of the Allied occupation force. The British are in the process of handing over to the Americans, and the streets of Reykjavik are crawling with servicemen whose relations with the local women are a major cause for concern. Flovent, Reykjavik's sole detective, is joined by the young military policeman Thorson, the son of Icelandic emigrants to Canada.
When a young woman is found lying half-naked in the snow, bleeding and unconscious, and a highly esteemed, elderly writer falls to his death in the local theater, Ari is dragged straight into the heart of a community where he can trust no one and secrets and lies are a way of life. Past plays tag with the present and the claustrophobic tension mounts as Ari is thrust ever deeper into his own darkness - blinded by snow and with a killer on the loose.
An online flirtation can have horrific consequences, as Detective Inspector Louise Rick discovers when she is called to an idyllic Copenhagen neighborhood where a young woman has been left bound and gagged after a profoundly brutal rape attack. Susanne Hansson met her rapist on a popular dating website; fearing the assailant is trolling the site for his next target, Louise is determined to cut him off at the pass. But then a new victim is found - dead this time - and the case becomes even more complex when Susanne attempts suicide.
Stavern, 1983. After a brutal robbery, a young policeman named William Wisting is edged off the investigation by more experienced officers, but soon he is on another case that has not even been recognised as murder. Forgotten in a dilapidated barn stands a bullet-riddled old car, and it looks as if the driver did not get out alive. This case will shape William Wisting as a policeman and give him insight that he will carry with him for the rest of his career.
The only person who might have the answers to a baffling murder case is the victim's seven-year-old daughter, found hiding in the room where her mother died. And she's not talking. Newly-promoted, out of his depth, detective Huldar turns to Freyja for her expertise with traumatized young people. Freyja, who distrusts the police in general and Huldar in particular, isn't best pleased. But she's determined to keep little Margret safe. It may prove tricky. The killer is leaving them strange clues: warnings in text messages, sums scribbled on bits of paper, numbers on the radio.
After a student choir’s practice session at a Helsinki villa turns deadly, Detective Maria Kallio finds herself in the middle of the action - and her first murder case. Someone in the group wanted playboy Tommi Peltonen dead, but that’s one song these suspects refuse to sing. Behind the choir’s jovial facade lies bitter passion, and the victim’s seemingly perfect life hid a host of sins that made him a target of almost everyone in the villa. As a young female - and a redhead to boot - Maria knows that solving this case will help her overcome her perceived shortcoming in the eyes of her colleagues.
Reykjavik, August 1941. When a travelling sales rep is found murdered in a Reykjavik flat, killed by a bullet from a Colt 45, the police initially suspect a member of the Allied occupation force. The British are in the process of handing over to the Americans, and the streets of Reykjavik are crawling with servicemen whose relations with the local women are a major cause for concern. Flovent, Reykjavik's sole detective, is joined by the young military policeman Thorson, the son of Icelandic emigrants to Canada.
When a young woman is found lying half-naked in the snow, bleeding and unconscious, and a highly esteemed, elderly writer falls to his death in the local theater, Ari is dragged straight into the heart of a community where he can trust no one and secrets and lies are a way of life. Past plays tag with the present and the claustrophobic tension mounts as Ari is thrust ever deeper into his own darkness - blinded by snow and with a killer on the loose.
An online flirtation can have horrific consequences, as Detective Inspector Louise Rick discovers when she is called to an idyllic Copenhagen neighborhood where a young woman has been left bound and gagged after a profoundly brutal rape attack. Susanne Hansson met her rapist on a popular dating website; fearing the assailant is trolling the site for his next target, Louise is determined to cut him off at the pass. But then a new victim is found - dead this time - and the case becomes even more complex when Susanne attempts suicide.
Stavern, 1983. After a brutal robbery, a young policeman named William Wisting is edged off the investigation by more experienced officers, but soon he is on another case that has not even been recognised as murder. Forgotten in a dilapidated barn stands a bullet-riddled old car, and it looks as if the driver did not get out alive. This case will shape William Wisting as a policeman and give him insight that he will carry with him for the rest of his career.
The only person who might have the answers to a baffling murder case is the victim's seven-year-old daughter, found hiding in the room where her mother died. And she's not talking. Newly-promoted, out of his depth, detective Huldar turns to Freyja for her expertise with traumatized young people. Freyja, who distrusts the police in general and Huldar in particular, isn't best pleased. But she's determined to keep little Margret safe. It may prove tricky. The killer is leaving them strange clues: warnings in text messages, sums scribbled on bits of paper, numbers on the radio.
After a student choir’s practice session at a Helsinki villa turns deadly, Detective Maria Kallio finds herself in the middle of the action - and her first murder case. Someone in the group wanted playboy Tommi Peltonen dead, but that’s one song these suspects refuse to sing. Behind the choir’s jovial facade lies bitter passion, and the victim’s seemingly perfect life hid a host of sins that made him a target of almost everyone in the villa. As a young female - and a redhead to boot - Maria knows that solving this case will help her overcome her perceived shortcoming in the eyes of her colleagues.
In The Gap of Time, Jeanette Winterson's cover version of The Winter's Tale, we move from London, a city reeling after the 2008 financial crisis, to a storm-ravaged American city called New Bohemia. Her story is one of childhood friendship, money, status, technology, and the elliptical nature of time. Written with energy and wit, this is a story of the consuming power of jealousy on the one hand and redemption and the enduring love of a lost child on the other.
A 90-year-old man is found dead in his bed, smothered with his own pillow. On his desk, the police find newspaper cuttings about a murder case dating from the Second World War, when a young woman was found strangled behind Reykjavik's National Theatre. Konrad, a former detective, is bored with retirement and remembers the crime. He grew up in "the shadow district", a rough neighborhood bordered by the National Theatre. Why would someone be interested in that crime now?
In this final installment of the internationally best-selling Irene Huss Investigations, the gang warfare that has been brewing in Goteborg is about to explode. A member of a notorious biker gang has been set on fire - alive. Even in a culture where ritual killings are common, this brutal assault attracts the attention of both Irene's unit and the Organized Crimes Unit. Anticipating a counterattack, the two units team up to patrol the lavish party of a rival gang, but that doesn't stop another murder from occurring just outside the event hall.
Before Harry took on the neo-Nazi gangs of Oslo, before he met Rakel, before The Snowman tried to take everything he held dear, he went to Australia. Harry Hole is sent to Sydney to investigate the murder of Inger Holter, a young Norwegian girl who was working in a bar. Initially sidelined as an outsider, Harry becomes central to the Australian police investigation when they start to notice a number of unsolved rape and murder cases around the country. The victims were usually young blondes. Inger had a number of admirers, each with his own share of secrets, but there is no obvious suspect.
A promising young singer is found dead in a clearing in a forest, gruesomely murdered - her larynx cut out and an antique music box placed carefully atop her body, playing a mysterious lullaby that sounds familiar but that no one can quite place. Chief Inspector Odd Singsaker, of the Trondheim Police Department, still recovering from brain surgery, is called in to investigate.
A small-time drug dealer is found battered to death on the outskirts of the Norwegian capital, Oslo. A young Dutchman, walking aimlessly in central Oslo covered in blood, is taken into custody but refuses to talk. When he is informed that the woman who discovered the body, Karen Borg, is a lawyer, he demands her as his defender, although her specialty is civil, not criminal, law. The young man is adamant: he will speak to Karen Borg, and to her alone.
On a hot July morning on Sweden's idyllic vacation island of Sandhamn, a man takes his dog for a walk and makes a gruesome discovery: a body, tangled in fishing net, has washed ashore. Police detective Thomas Andreasson is the first to arrive on the scene. Before long, he has identified the deceased as Krister Berggren, a bachelor from the mainland who has been missing for months. All signs point to an accident - until another brutalized corpse is found at the local bed-and-breakfast.
Chief Inspector Van Veeteren knew that murder cases were never as open-and-shut as this one: Janek Mitter woke one morning with a brutal hangover and discovered his wife of three months lying facedown in the bathtub, dead. With only the flimsiest excuse as his defense, he is found guilty of a drunken crime of passion and imprisoned in a mental institution.
Irene Huss is a former Ju-Jitsu champion, a mother of twin teenage girls, the wife of a successful chef, and a Detective Inspector with the Violent Crimes Unit in Goteborg, Sweden. And now she’s back with a gripping follow-up to Detective Inspector Huss. One nurse lies dead and another vanishes after their hospital is hit by a blackout. The only witness claims to have seen Nurse Tekla doing her rounds, but Nurse Tekla died sixty years ago.
Tumba, Sweden. A triple homicide—all the victims from the same family—captivates Detective Inspector Joona Linna. The killer is at large, and it appears that the elder sister of the family escaped the carnage; it seems only a matter of time until she, too, is murdered. But where can Linna begin? The only surviving witness is the boy whose mother, father, and little sister were killed before his eyes. He has suffered more than 100 knife wounds and lapsed into a state of shock. He’s in no condition to be questioned....
Anna Fekete returns to the Balkan village of her birth for a relaxing summer holiday. But when her purse is stolen and the thief is found dead on the banks of the river, Anna is pulled into a murder case. Her investigation leads straight to her own family, to closely guarded secrets concealing a horrendous travesty of justice that threatens them all. How long will it take before everything explodes?
Winter's chill has descended on Stockholm as police arrive at the scene of a shocking murder. An unidentified woman lies beheaded in a posh suburban home - a brutal crime made all the more disturbing by its uncanny resemblance to an unsolved killing 10 years earlier. But this time there's a suspect: the charismatic and controversial chain-store CEO Jesper Orre, who owns the home but is nowhere to be found.
As the temperature in Sweden reaches a record-breaking 45 degrees, forest fires break out. All those who have failed to escape Linköping for the summer take shelter indoors, shocked and paralysed by the heat. However, when a teenage girl is discovered naked and bleeding in the local park, it is clear that the raging heat is not the only plague affecting the town. Then a second girl is found dead. Alarmed by the fact that the victims are the same age as her daughter, Tove, detective Malin Fors will work round-the-clock to capture the perpetrator. But as every lead comes to nothing, it is as though the oppressive heat is clogging up the wheels of her investigation. And time is not on Malin's side.…
There is little to recommend this drab little tale which suffers the double disadvantage of extremely poor authorship with bad translation.
After a promising debut with Midwinter Sacrifice I was hoping for far more than this. The problem is that the author pads his tale with mind numbing trivia and the risable mental meanderings of his increasinly unattractive female lead, who manifests as an out of context Victorian hysteric with pseudo feminist pretensions.. That the whimpering, but allegedly "Brilliant", Malin has attained such an elevated position in the Swedish police force is hardly credible and the authors delusional portrayal of women does them no favours. Then there is the simpering chorus of the murdered young girls rattling away in the background like a swarm of prematurely senile wasps adding yet another meaningless dimension to this plastic confection.In addition there are worrying glimpses of very real sexism & racism in this shallow tome.
Summertime Death is a fine example of, in Kallentofts own words,"the rapturous elevation of the mediocre and the uninteresting"
The writing is truly abysmal and the author should be prosecuted for crimes against the simile.
Scandanavian Crime Fiction has some stunning works, such as the books of Jo Nesbo & Henning Mankell - this execrable rambling is not among their number.
Given the appaling material the female reader fits very well
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
Having listened to, and enjoyed Midwinter Sacrifice, the first book featuring Malin Fors, I was keen to listen to this, especially since it had a different narrator.
The story's pacing is slow at first , and only really picks up towards the very end, but the use of voices, including those of the murder victims, kept me interested. The weather and seasons are notable as characters in these books, and as a heatwave raged around me in real life, it was easy to imagine the one in the book. Perhaps the slow pace was a reflection on the heat in Linköping, adding to the feeling of sluggishness felt by the characters themselves.
I was pleased to find Malin's inner thoughts more believable than in the last book, and I was much happier with the narration in Summertime Death, too because it wasn't as monotonous, thus breathing more life into the various characters; and this despite some being dead. Pleasingly, I was unable to discern the perpetrator in this book which counterbalanced the lack of astonishment at the identity of the last abductee.
I would recommend this audio book, especially if the listener has enjoyed Midwinter Sacrifice. I also look forward to listening to Autumn Killing and Savage Spring in the same series being translated.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful
I really tried with this book as the summery sounded great. But after half way through the first part I had to give up as I couldn't really work out what was going on and it was all dragging a bit!
2 of 2 people found this review helpful
What made the experience of listening to Summertime Death the most enjoyable?
Interesting story that had a number of threads and quite a few possible solutions that could each have been the correct answer.
What did you like best about this story?
I like the very unusual for Scandi-Noir setting of the stories - hot in the city, you might call it.
Rarely do you get forest fires, heat-exhausted police and swimming pools in Scandinavian crime fiction....here it is in abundance, a nice change........
What does Jane Collingwood bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you had only read the book?
A slightly less enjoyable listen than the first one - Lisa Coleman's reading of the first book was better......
The ability to listen to the book.....?
No need for eyes and therefore less chance you will bump into things whilst enjoying the book.....
Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?
No.....but that's just me....I have no empathy!
Any additional comments?
Overall, very enjoyable. The story is a good one with interesting characters and plot points, enough suspects and motives to make the answer on of several possible...the backdrop to the main story of a record hot summer, forest fires and a steaming city are an interesting and unusual choice for a Scandi-Noir thriller as well...
I absolutely loved Midwinter Sacrifice and the narration of the fantastic Lisa Coleman was perfectly mesmerising. I was so excited to see the second in the series on audio but rather disappointed to see that it wasn't read by Lisa Coleman (why?). Unfortunately Jane Collingwood has completely spoilt this series for me- her voice is completely wrong for the atmosphere of these books and really grated on me ( not the first time her narration has ruined an audiobook for me). This started off very slowly too, so combined with the appalling narration was not a gripping listen.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful